Palestinians fight Zionist expansion

By Hilda Cuzco, in the The Militant,Vol. 61, no. 11, 17 March 1997

Palestinians throughout the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem held a
five-hour general strike March 3 to protest Tel Aviv's decision to
build a new Israeli housing project in the mostly Arab area of east
Jerusalem. The work stoppage followed a series of marches and other
protests by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories the last
week in February.

Today's strike is a clear message that the settlement policy is
unacceptable, rejected, and a policy that will explode the peace
process, said Ahmad Qurie in Jerusalem. Qurie is the speaker of
the Palestinian legislature, which called the strike, shutting down
shops, schools, and transportation.

At a Cabinet meeting headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the
Israeli government approved February 26 the development of a Jewish
settlement in the hilltop of Jabal Abu Ghneim, known as Har Homa in
Hebrew, in East Jerusalem. This and other Israeli construction plans
aim to surround East Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim as their
capital, and cut off the city from the West Bank.

Fearful of the Palestinians' indignation over his decision, Netanyahu
went on the radio to argue that this was a move for peaceful
coexistence and harmony between Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and
Arabs. Netanyahu also promised to grant 3,500 building permits to
Palestinians in 10 East Jerusalem neighborhoods.

This did not placate Palestinian residents, many of whom were already
involved in protests. On February 25, around 300 Palestinians and
Israeli peace activists carrying flags and banners marched from
Bethlehem to the controversial hilltop, protesting the
project. According to witnesses, the Israeli police prevented them
from reaching Jerusalem. The action was sponsored by the Committee for
the Defense of Palestinian Lands, and supported by the Palestinian
Authority. Later that day, undercover Israeli soldiers invaded the
town of Hizma, north of Jerusalem, killing one Palestinian and wounded
three others when confronted by protesting villagers. Reporters
described seeing army reinforcements being pelted with stones by angry
youth and who in turn threw concussion grenades and beat the young
people.

Army reports in Israel indicate that the three plainclothed Israelis
were from a covert army unit known as Duvdevan, or Cherry, that was
created during the years of the Palestinian 1987-93 uprising known as
the intifada. The Duvdevan is infamous for covert operations and
killing suspects.

Israeli officials claimed Palestinian youth started the fighting in
Hizma. But according to Palestinian residents of the village, the
protests began after the undercover cops killed Mohammed Abdel Aziz
Abu Hallowi, a 56-year-old retired worker, in an unprovoked
attack. The wounded included Ali Abdallah Mutlak Salahedin, 46, a
construction worker.

Expanded settlements are provocation

In the West Bank city of Hebron, Nidal Abu Hadid, a 30-
year-old grocery store owner, said that the policies of the Israeli
government are prompting confrontations similar to last year. If
Netanyahu insists on building in East Jerusalem, this time there will
be more bloodshed, Abu Hadid told an Associated Press
reporter. Battles erupted between Palestinians and Israeli troops
after the prime minister decided last September to build a new
entrance to a tourist tunnel along Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem. The
fighting lasted three days and claimed 80 lives.

On March 3 Netanyahu visited an East Jerusalem neighborhood and
promised to permit the construction of new housing in the Arab parts
of the city. What we are doing today is to make Jerusalem one city
for Jews and Arabs alike, he said.

Since Tel Aviv seized East Jerusalem in the 1967 Arab- Israeli
war, it has annexed more than a third of the city and built 39,000
housing units designated for Jews, but none for Palestinians. Heavy
restrictions on building Arab housing in Jerusalem have ensured that
the number of Palestinian residents does not exceed 28 percent of the
population, the same as when it was captured. The prime minister was
quoted by the AP agency news on March 4 as saying, We are going to
build. If it weren't for the legal restrictions, the bulldozers would
have been on Har Homa yesterday and not just two weeks from now.

Should the housing project go ahead on the 457 acres that
comprise the controversial hilltop, which was expropriated by the
Israeli government in 1991, there will be as many as 6,500 housing
units for 32,000 Jewish settlers. At the same time the Haaretz
newspaper confirmed that Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai has
approved a construction of 1,500 homes, and 3,000 hotel rooms in the
West Bank that would link the largest Jewish settlement there with
Jerusalem. Adding to the tension, David Bar-Illan, a senior aide to
Netanyahu, suggested the army may miss a deadline to withdraw its
troops from some rural areas in the West Bank. The withdrawal had
been agreed in the Hebron accords between Tel Aviv and the Palestinian
Authority reached in January.

Meanwhile, the Israeli regime continues its probes to evict
Palestinians, particularly of the Bedouin tribes, from their lands in
the West Bank. In Al Eizariya, a town in the West Bank, the Bedouin
tribe known as the Jahalin fought eviction in February with Israeli
soldiers. The police dragged scores of men, women, and children from
their encampment to a hillside near a garbage dump. They were evicted
to make room for expansion of an Israeli settlement in the town of
Maaleh Adumim, five miles east of Jerusalem.

Under an agreement between Tel Aviv and the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO), rural lands of the West Bank should come under
Palestinian control in the next two years. Mohammed Abu Hirsh, who
headed the campaign against evictions, said that the Jahalin arrived
in the West Bank after being expelled from southern Israel in the
early 1950s and half the tribe fled across the Jordan River in the
1967 Mideast war. Those were expulsions in times of war, now this
is an expulsion of peace, said Abu Hirsh. What kind of peace is
this?

Clinton gives mild criticism of Tel Aviv

In Washington, Palestinian Authority leader Yasir Arafat met
with President William Clinton March 3, as the strike was proceeding
in the occupied territories. Clinton offered a few critical words
toward Tel Aviv's decision to expands the settlements. I think it
builds mistrust, and I wish that it had not been made, the
U.S. president said. Nevertheless, he made clear that the
U.S. government, which brokered the Hebron accords, won't take
sides and said it should be left to the Palestinians and Israelis to
determine the final status of talks on the occupied
territories.

Arafat also met with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, as well as Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin and the
director of the Agency for International Development, Brian
Atwood. All of these meetings, the big-business press reported,
discussed increasing investment in the Palestinian territories.

Before his visit to the White House, Arafat had urged that protests
should be peaceful and without confrontations, according to
Marwan Barghouthi, secretary general of the PLO. We're not
interested in violent incidents and Palestinian or Israeli casualties,
but the young people are not under remote control, said
Barghouthi. It depends on the Israeli side.

Earlier that week in Nablus, West Bank, a broad meeting of Palestinian
groups called the Comprehensive Palestinian National Dialogue
Conference was held on February 27. Groups both supporting and
opposing the peace accords with Tel Aviv were present, including
Arafat. The gathering was the first since the signing of the so-called
Oslo accords in 1993, which set a framework for limited Palestinian
control over some of the occupied territories. The objective was to
reach a national unity, said Salim Zaanoun in his opening
talk. Zaanoun is the chairman of the Palestine National Council, the
largest decision-making body of the PLO.

The participating groups included the Islamic organization
Hamas, as well as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, both
factions of the PLO. These groups oppose the accords reached between
Arafat and the Israeli regime as a sell out, but are interested in
having a role within in a final settlement with Tel Aviv. Jamal
Mansour, a member of the Hamas delegation, said Hamas is outside
the negotiations and doesn't expect much from them, but it will work
to strengthen the negotiators, and will stand behind them, even though
it may disagree with them.

As the Palestinian resistance heats up, Netanyahu's government has
come under increasing fire from his opponents in the Israeli ruling
class. Israel Radio announced February 27 that police investigators
were considering indictments against several top government officials
on allegations of corruption in the appointment of an unqualified
lawyer as attorney general last month. Netanyahu himself has been
named as a possible target. Among the allegations is that a vote in
the Hebron accords was part of a deal. The Prime Minister has also
been under the gun from the right-wing members of his coalition, who
have accused him of backing off from settlement construction and
criticized the withdrawal from Hebron and the redeployment of Israeli
troops scheduled to begin March 6.

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